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2 Poems by Larry Smith

I wake inside the day,
breaking my shell of sleep
into conscious light—
Like a wave my mind
runs forward on itself
conceiving my script as
separate from myself…
ego crying to be
dressed and fed.
My eyes close again—
and I feel the wonder
of being just the water.
Harbored in the all
I do not seek to rise
and be apart from
this oneness, and yet…
Sunlight falls through curtains,
a bird calls my name,
my face outside the mirror
the struggle that is life—
being both water and the wave.

A Moment of Silence

What if the speaker had said,
“Now, let us take 10 minutes of silence”?
How would the crowd have felt
passing through the anxious seconds
into whole minutes of sweet stillness,
sitting or standing, hands folding,
eyes perhaps closing, as when
an orchestra begins to play?
Not silence but stillness,
taking in all, breathing it out
again and again, slowly
like horses in a meadow.
I once saw Allen Ginsberg at NYU
turn a crowd of 500 into meditators
drinking in the quiet shared,
touching the calm within ourselves
moving the moments into hours.